When we talk about a collaborative system, we refer to an information system that facilitates the efficient exchange of data, documents, files, and knowledge among teams and collaborators within an organization.
If you think about it, in today's economy, the daily work of many productive activities depends on collaborative systems. That's why on our blog, we have developed articles to analyze the challenges in their design, redesign, and now, their implementation.
In "Why CSCW applications fail," Jonathan Grudin (1988) identifies the three main factors that lead to failure in the implementation of a collaborative system:
- Major differences between the users who benefit from an application and those who must perform additional work to support the system's operation.
- Lack of intuition in managing collaborative systems.
- Extreme difficulty in evaluating applications.
It is worth noting that the context described by Grudin was typical of a research and practice environment that was just forming.
However, as collaborative systems were incorporated as a fundamental part of various types of work teams, some challenges were overcome, while new ones emerged.
With the massive adoption of services like Google Drive, Trello, or Slack, which went through intensive periods of testing and evaluation, it is expected that evaluation (challenge #3 in Grudin's work) is no longer a major problem.
Furthermore, given that both organizations and individuals increasingly have experience (documented or not) in implementing collaborative systems, the lack of intuition in management also does not seem to be an insurmountable problem.
Adopting existing collaborative systems instead of "reinventing the wheel" by developing custom internal systems also ensures that the platform has undergone prior evaluations that have led to continuous improvements.
The truth is that organizational challenges, mainly generated by the gap between those who implement (e.g., developers) or those who request implementation (e.g., executive-level individuals) and those who actually use a system, still exist.
Using a collaborative system can add new tasks and generate additional workload compared to "natural" collaborative work, i.e., not supported by a system (Dourish and Bellotti, 1992).
In this sense, the use of collaborative systems and technology in general has an impact on people's behavior and work practices. Over time, certain roles tend to disappear, while new ones emerge.
Although not directly named, Grudin refers to the importance of ethnography and user-centered design as a fundamental process when designing a new collaborative system:
“We need to have a better understanding of how groups and organizations function (…) At the same time, we also need to know more about individual differences in responding to technology if we are to develop systems that can support entire groups. (…) We must also develop a better behavioral understanding of our own decision – making processes as researchers and developers”.
Other relatively new challenges are the need to generate awareness (in English) or knowledge of others' work, in terms of actions and the content generated as such, coordination (Dourish and Bellotti, 1992), and privacy (Harrison and Dourish, 1996).
Understanding the challenges surrounding collaborative systems is essential when designing, developing, and implementing these systems in an organization.
Taking this topic to a different, more conceptual level, in an interesting, albeit somewhat abstract, work, Harrison and Dourish (1996) advocate for the need to treat collaborative systems from the perspective of the place where certain behaviors are fostered and actions with a certain cultural connotation are performed.
In contrast to this vision of place, there would be the spatial, which the authors consider incorrect for approaching a collaborative system design process.
The following sentence synthesizes Harrison and Dourish's principle:
“Space is the opportunity; place is the understood reality”.
As an observation, I find both the content and the form of this work presented at the CSCW conference interesting, given its orientation towards an opinion about a specific area, and the questioning of how design processes are approached.
Finally, the three works focus on different aspects in the practice and research of collaborative systems: two use case studies (Grudin, Dourish and Bellotti), while the third (Harrison and Dourish, 1996) is more of a conceptual approach that proposes recommendations for the collaborative system design process.
Have you participated in collaborative system design and implementation projects? What was your experience?
- Dourish, P., Bellotti, V. (1992). Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work.
- Grudin, J. (1988). Why CSCW Applications Fail: Problems in the Design and Evaluation of Organizational Interfaces.
- Harrison, S., Dourish, P. (1996). Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems. In Proceedings of CSCW Conference.
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